By Madhusree Chatterjee, IANS,
New Delhi : Raconteurs, the lifeline of the frozen Scandinavian winters, keep the entertainment mill running with storytelling when the fjords sink beneath mountains of ice.
Meet Denmark-based Jussi Adler-Olsen, the new sensation on the Stieg Larsson block, whose award-winning suspense stories inspired by global cinema and literature, including those from India, have helped millions of Scandinavians and Europeans ride the chill for more than a decade.
“I have been influenced by Indian writers like Vikram Seth, Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy. I am a movie man. I have watched movies by Guru Dutt and Satyajit Ray’s “Pather Panchali”,” Olsen, who also studied cinematography, told IANS in a telephonic interview from London.
His flagship thriller “Mercy”, starring popular Danish homicide detective Carl Morck, has been translated into English for the first time and published by Penguin Books-UK.
“Mercy”, available in India, has remained on the top of the Danish and German best-sellers’ charts with its follow-up “Disgrace” for a year.
Olsen is the winner of the Glass Key Award 2010 for the best Nordic crime fiction, previously awarded to Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell and Jo Nesbo.
An Alfred Hitchcock fan, Olsen said movies have taught him “not to jump from one person’s head to another’s in one chapter and not to let the person in one chapter know what is going to happen in the next”.
The 61-year-old Olsen, a Danish comic book pioneer, was a publisher and an editor before moving to writing in the 1990s. He is the author of several books, including “The Alphabet House” (1997) and “Journal 64” (2010).
“In 1997, I tried to have my first novel ‘The Alphabet House’ translated, but the publishers told me that they were translating Scandinavian literature because it was so grey dark and grim. I decided to wait. May be, they got fed up (printing British and American novels),” Olsen said.
“We have also changed in the last 20 years. Our (Scandinavian) literature is international, mixing elements. We are reading a lot of Indian and foreign literature. In Britain and the US, I don’t think many thriller writers would care so much about international literature,” he said.
Movies and stories are integral to the Scandinavian way of life.
“When we were young without television, the harsh winters were spent storytelling. We invented stories from our imagination and I want to know what kind of stories the next generation will write,” said the writer.
“Reading and seeing movies from other countries are important for Scandinavians as with other countries with small languages. We are very close to other cultures and it has an impact on our writing. Danes are also liberal by nature,” he said.
“In ‘Mercy’, I wrote about the fate of the missing politician Merete Lynggard even before Natascha Maria Kampusch, the Austrian television hostess, escaped from captivity in 2006 after being held for eight years in a cellar,” Olsen said.
The story builds thus.
Olsen’s emotionally disturbed detective Carl Morck, head of the newly-created “Department Q” “which solves unsolved cases with special focus”, is assigned to trace a missing politician who disappeared five years ago. Everyone thinks she is dead, till Morck stumbles upon the truth.
Morck, the protagonist, is a bit of Olsen himself.
“A part of the character is taken from my past. I grew up with my psychiatrist father in mental hospitals. I met the character Morck in 1956, when I was six. He was a patient who had to be calmed with drugs. My father explained that he was tortured by his wife – and one day he exploded and killed her,” Olsen recalled.
Later, he wanted “to explore how evil and good look together in us like Carl,” Olsen said. “Carl is also lazy and a little too frank like me,” he added.
Olsen’s openness and his ability for humour have prompted a “political statement” in his book through a funny sidekick named Assad.
“Assad, unlike Carl, is a two-dimensional character. No one knows what happened to Assad in his former life,” Olsen said.
“But it is real good part for an immigrant. We learn so much from people immigrating in our country. The immigration of Islamic origin people is high in Denmark and it is very un-Danish to hate them. We were such friendly people till a few years ago and I am fighting through my books to get that (friendliness) back,” Olsen said.
(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at [email protected])